


Slumbering Heart

by cosmogeny



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Family, Fluff, M/M, Vacation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-24
Updated: 2017-05-24
Packaged: 2018-11-04 14:13:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10992582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmogeny/pseuds/cosmogeny
Summary: Phil burns, Dan soothes, and they hold hands on their way to the fried dough.Or, a Lester family vacation featuring sunburns, strawberry syrup, and the different ways we show our love.





	Slumbering Heart

“Ow,” Phil whines, reedy and a bit pathetic. 

 

“I haven’t even touched you yet,” Dan says. 

 

“Yes but even the anticipation is painful.” 

 

“You’ve no one to blame but yourself, you twat,” Dan says, and tries not to sound too fond. He mostly fails. Falling asleep in a sunchair is a mistake Phil seems keen to make as many times as possible. Phil Lester: World Class Idiot. Dan’s World Class Idiot, though. 

 

Phil is a vision in red. He’s lying face down on their shared bed — an impossibly small twin because Dan wasn’t really supposed to be here — with his shirt off, his back a startling shade of red. Dan had poked it once, meanly, but the agonized grunt he received was enough to shelve the temptation for when Phil was less freshly burnt. 

 

Dan’s straddling Phil’s ass, his hands covered in aloe and hovering above the masterpiece of Phil’s back. Even without touching he can feel the heat radiating off Phil’s skin, lobster-red and an awful mosaic of bug bites and moles. The hunch by his shoulders doesn’t go away even when he’s lying down, and Dan can’t stop staring, following the curve of Phil’s spine. Can’t help counting his blessings, as numerous and lovely as the freckles splashed across Phil’s shoulder blades. 

 

“Get on with it, then,” Phil eventually says when Dan’s been staring just a bit too long. So Dan does. Splays his hands gently around Phil’s sides and watches his body twitch against the warring sensations: the pain of the burn, the soothing cool of the aloe, and Phil’s unbearably ticklish ribs. Touching Phil has never been a hardship, but tending to his sunburns has always been particularly fun for Dan. “You’re a sadist,” Phil says like he’s reading Dan’s mind. 

 

“My poor baby,” Dan monotones. “Let me wipe the sweat from your alabaster brow.” He works his hands up to Phil’s shoulders, rubbing with a bit more pressure now, letting the aloe do its work. 

 

“I am a poor baby,” Phil pouts. He’s tense beneath Dan’s hands, his muscles tight against the pain and knotted up with poor posture and an even poorer sleeping situation. They both like their space at night, but Phil in particular is suffering from the shared twin. They’re sleeping so tight together, curled uncomfortably over one another, sharing one stupid, overly fluff pillow. Dan works his fingers into one of the knots and Phil hisses into said pillow. “At least you don’t steal the blankets when the bed’s this small,” Phil says. 

 

“I could still go home,” Dan suggests. He’s teasing, mostly. Phil begged him to stay, after all. He wanted Dan here, with him, on his family vacation. But part of Dan still feels unworthy, still feels like he’s intruding on familial bliss and mucking it up with his otherness. His imperfections. Ruining everyone’s fun by poking their sunburns and calling them names because he never learned to express affection outright, without cloaking it in rudeness or bookending it with taunts. Sincerity, in his family, was to be avoided at all costs. Any accidental displays of earnestness make him blush. The Lesters are warm, and everything they say to him is so heartfelt, and part of him wants to bask in it but a larger part of him feels wildly uncomfortable, and then guilty for the discomfort. 

 

So he’s only  _ mostly _ teasing when he says it again, “I could go home still.” Phil’s body doesn’t change beneath him, still tense and burning. “You’d have the bed all to yourself.” 

 

“Stop threatening me,” Phil whines. He buries his face further into the pillow but pushes up into Dan’s hands, a grumpy, needy contradiction. “Leaving me alone is a crime punishable by torture.” 

 

Dan, comforted by this, allows himself a grin. “What kind of torture?”

 

“I can hear you smiling. So whatever  _ torture _ you’re thinking about, not that.” 

 

“Mhm,” Dan says, lips stretched wide. He loses himself then in the rhythmic up and down glide of his hands on Phil’s back, the softness of Phil’s skin even while the heat pours off of him in waves. 

 

Little by little Phil relaxes into the mattress, letting out a sigh every now and again, moaning once, gorgeously, when Dan goes back for more aloe. He’s drowsing in and out but he sits, abruptly, when Dan is finished. “The torture is that you have to watch HGTV with me when we get back tonight.” 

 

Dan, who cannot stand the stuffy, uppity people on all those shows but loves the way Phil watches so intently and says things like, “Our house is going to have a huge garden” and, “Don’t laugh but I think I can build that table for us” just sighs and pretends to be put-upon, quietly looking forward to an evening of Phil narrating the possibilities of their future.

 

***

 

There’s a pier stretching out into the ocean at the beach by the house they rented, with a carousel and a ferris wheel and games that are rigged to take your money. Martyn knows this but happily loses thirty American dollars trying to win Cornelia a neon green stuffed rhino while she loudly and repeatedly complains that she doesn’t want it, “please stop wasting your money, Martyn.” He does give up eventually, $30 poorer and with nothing to show for it, but Cornelia promises to buy him some deep fried oreos and leads him away by the hand. 

 

The lights from the pier get caught in the ripples of the water and reflect onto their skin. Greens and blues and yellows dance across Phil’s red face, giving him a nauseous kind of glow, but they catch and twinkle in his eyes too and that’s where Dan loses himself, loses his mind, reaching for Phil’s hand before he knows that he’s doing. 

 

Dan is a planner. Phil’s the impulsive one, the one who’ll leave the shop with three bars of chocolate and a weird animal figurine. Dan will think about that magazine he saw, will go back the next day if he decides he really needs it. Dan does not rashly, _foolishly_ , grab his boyfriend’s hand on a crowded pier in fucking _Florida_. 

 

Except, apparently, for how he does.

 

He pulls Phil along with their fingers linked, acts like he had, in fact, planned this because he’s not about to admit that he got swept away in Phil’s eyes like this is 2009 and he’s leaving increasingly embarrassing comments on Phil’s emo boy selfies. Phil hesitates, just for a moment, but allows himself to be dragged along as they follow after Martyn and Cornelia. 

 

Martyn and Cornelia, who can hold hands without worrying about anything other than sweaty palms. He feels bitter about that, about  _ them _ , and hate himself for it. But Dan’s thoughtless impulse has left him feeling on edge, tense, hypervigilant. He feels ready to spring apart if a single gaze lands on their entwined fingers. He’s panicked, overwhelmingly anxious not knowing who’s looking, but worse,  _ how  _ they’re looking. Do they care? Are they envious? Do they have cameras with which to out the two of them? Do they have anger and hatred and malice and the strength to back it up? Dan would step in front of Phil in an instant but adrenaline will only get him so far and he hasn’t been in a fight since secondary school. Would anyone step in? Is Florida a red state? Is—

 

Phil squeezes his hand, uses the leverage to pull Dan closer to his side, and Dan feels something else entirely. He feels…  _ giddy _ . He feels like a teenager again, dizzy over the simple act of holding hands. He feels cherished and treasured and a little star-struck to be walking down the pier on this gorgeous night, with this gorgeous boy, and they’re  _ holding hands _ and he kind of  _ wants  _ people to look, to see them and have no more or less of a reaction than they’d have to seeing Martyn and Cornelia. The lovely, lovely Martyn and Cornelia who have only ever accepted Dan, accepted who he is to Phil, who don’t deserve his misplaced anger. 

 

They follow the bright red bounce of Cornelia’s curls through the crowds and it’s unlikely that anyone would even see their joined hands when the pier is packed so tight, but Dan lets the feeling bubble up in him anyway.

 

“Why does this feel more scandalous than me like, licking your ass?”

 

It’s hard to tell with the sunburn, but Dan’s pretty sure that makes Phil go red. 

 

“Shut up,” Phil mutters, and yeah, he’s definitely blushing. “But also, because you internalized a lot of really damaging things when you were younger.” 

 

“Gee,” Dan says. “Thanks.” 

 

“And because you feel like your queerness is inherently inappropriate and so holding hands in public is crude but licking my ass in the private of our home a-okay.” 

 

“Phil, oh my god, stop,” Dan whines, bravely turning his face to hide in Phil’s shoulders. “I’m working on it. I’ve been working on it for years. I’m holding your disgustingly sweaty hand, aren’t I?”

 

“Yep. And you like it.” Phil’s grin is loud and pleased and Dan doesn’t even have to look. He squeezes Phil’s hand and thinks, maybe, by the end of the night, he could kiss Phil’s exposed, freckled shoulder in the darkness of the beach. 

 

“I like fried dough,” Dan says. “I like it when people buy me fried dough.” 

 

“People, huh? Good thing there’s a whole pier full of them. Better start begging.” Dan punches him in the shoulder, lightly, but Phil’s skin is still tender from his burn and he pulls his hand out from Dan’s with a pout. “That woman with the flamingo hat seems very friendly and willing.” 

 

“I like it when my  _ boyfriend  _ buys me fried dough,” Dan says. Nearly whispers it, fighting the urge to peer around them, to check for anyone who could be listening in. But he grabs Phil’s hand again, an entirely conscious decision this time around, and throws in some puppy dog eyes for good measure. 

 

“You’re so spoiled,” Phil sighs, reaching into his pocket for his wallet. They’ve queued up at the snack bar behind Martyn and Cornelia, who are arguing about whether they should sprinkle their oreos with powdered sugar. 

 

“And you’re so handsome,” Dan says, batting his eyelashes. “And strong. And you don’t look a day over twenty-nine. And wow, look at your skin, so creamy and not at all lobster-like.”

 

“That’s it, you’re sleeping on the couch,” Phil says, turning up his nose. “Probably get a better night’s sleep anyway.” 

 

“Stop threatening me,” Dan whines, butting his head into Phil’s chest. “I was never taught how to properly express my love.” 

 

Phil’s silent. Ominously so. Dan raises his head from the sweat-damp collar of Phil’s tank top and comes face-to-face with a look so soft and sweet that Dan’s body twitches uncomfortably with his need to flee that Lester earnestness and his desire to cuddle up under Phil’s arm. It’s a very awkward look, made all the more embarrassing by the red that blooms over his cheeks when Phil says, “You love me.” Pleased and matter-of-fact and looking a lot like how Dan felt when  _ the _ AmazingPhil wanted to Skype with him.

 

“I mean, yeah,” Dan mutters. “You’re buying me fried dough. Consider it like, a payment or whatever.” He’s not making eye contact because he can’t, not in front of all these people who are paying them no mind, not in front of Martyn and Cornelia who are busy talking to the cashier, not in front of  _ Phil _ who has seen him weak and wounded, sad and listless, angry and spiteful and has loved him through all of it. He should be able to do this for Phil. He should be able to be sweet and sugary and not a fucking dick, even just the once. But shame at his own feelings burns deep in his gut and singes all his sweet words on their way out, tarnishes them.

 

“That’s alright,” Phil says, looking even fonder somehow. He wraps an arm around Dan’s waist and Dan lets him. He can do that, at least. He even leans into Phil’s side. “I can be your sugar daddy.” 

 

“Noooo,” Dan says.

 

“Gross,” Martyn adds, his teeth black with fried oreos, powdered sugar dusting his upper lip. Cornelia makes a look like she’d like to echo that sentiment right back at him. 

 

“Your dough daddy,” Phil says, grinning as he steps up to order. “And you’re my Philsbury doughboy.” 

 

“Okay this is officially nastier than Martyn’s mouth,” Cornelia says. 

 

Phil gets them a basket of fried dough to share, drowns it in strawberry syrup and then blankets it in powdered sugar because he’s overly sweet and consumes a diet to match.

 

The four of them elbow their way off the pier and onto the beach below. The lights from the carousel in the water make Dan think of the fairy lights they’ve strung up around their new bedroom, make Dan think of home with fondness but not longing. It’s hard to miss something when such a big part of it is right there next to him, powdered sugar smudged across the bridge of his nose. 

 

Dan makes good on his promise to himself, deposits a strawberry-sticky kiss to Phil’s freckled shoulder while the waves lap at their feet, hoping the syrup makes him that little bit sweeter. Phil smiles at him, finishes the last of the fried dough, and shoves Dan over into the ocean with a glint in his eye and a too-slow retreat that begs for retribution. Dan chases after him, dripping and sandy and too pleased to be annoyed. 

 

Phil likes him a little mean. Likes his sharp corners and snarky attitude. Phil, Dan thinks as he tackles him at the waist and sends him none-too-gently into the ocean, loves him even without the sweetness. 

**Author's Note:**

> Been awhile since I've written anything, but it was a very slow day at work, so here we are! I've been listening to a lot of Rilo Kiley lately, and the title is taken from _My Slumbering Heart_ which you should deffo give a listen to.
> 
> Find me on tumblr at cosmogenies.tumblr.com :)


End file.
